There are many ways to die, and not all of them, by any means, beautiful, as we are beginning to understand in the European Union. Because there are more and more voices announcing his imminent demise, which could occur at the hands of his enemies, be they his own or strangers, which there are, or by force majeure, which also.
The United Kingdom together with the United States and the USSR won the war against Hitler. Its leaders -Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin-, meeting in Yalta, Crimea, agreed to divide Europe into two blocs, and hence the Cold War. But the dividing line has turned out to be very shifting and what I’m going to haunt you, brunette, is what Putin would say.
The United Kingdom, which had not yet digested the loss of its empire, was reluctant to sign the Treaty of Rome in 1957. And the fact is that a thousand years without being invaded, especially after having survived the blitz, weighed heavily in those years on the psyche of the haughty British. But in 1973, in view of the succulent continental commercial market, they gave in, although it would seem that it was reluctant. And it has always been like this, until the disastrous Brexit, the biggest political mistake made in its history, blew everything up.
Already in 2005, Professor Cristie Davies made it very clear in “The strange death of moral Britain” that something was wrong, even very wrong, and that it also came from afar. Now, no matter how much the 17th and 18th centuries were marked by excessive violence, collective drunkenness or unbridled religious fanaticism, the long Victorian era gave the British what Professor Davies describes as “the Great Britain of the Respectability”.
It was then that they felt they were the masters of the world and a time in which, without the imposition of dogmas or the use of force, values ??based on duty, religion and patriotism prevailed, in addition to the British having freedoms unknown in the Continental europe.
Moral Britain experienced its heyday on the eve of World War I, years in which a crime rate was reached so low that it now seems unbelievable. That era continues to fascinate locals and strangers, no matter how much it was marked by abysmal social inequalities.
In the fifties, after winning World War II against the Nazis, morale, that very British morale, began to collapse. For four reasons, according to Professor Davies: 1) the abolition of the death penalty that was forged between 1957 and 1965; 2) the decriminalization of abortion, approved in 1967; 3) the reform of divorce legislation in 1969; 4) the decriminalization of homosexual acts between men, of 1967.
And it is not that Davies, a declared conservative man, had anything against these laws, but rather, he understood that, whether he liked it or not, they undermined the authority of “the sacred hierarchies” of conservatism; namely: the Church of England and the Armed Forces.
John Milton (1608-1674), the excellent blind English poet who never went down the street without carrying a sword at his belt, describes, in Paradise Lost, how pride was the sin that precipitated Satan’s expulsion from heaven.
Well, if any lesson can be drawn from Brexit, it is that an excess of arrogance combined with a moral vacuum can only lead to catastrophe, as we are seeing is happening in the United Kingdom and far beyond its borders.
